And just like that, it's December. Things are, for the most part, done with Neverfall at this point. The last bits that needs work are the final music tracks. Once that's done, they need to be integrated into the game and it should be ready to go. It's about time. To be honest, it's a little surreal that the game is almost out. Feels so strange to be playing around with new project ideas already...

Testing has gone quite well. I would have hoped to get a bit more in, but, people only have so much time to help out and debug. That said, it's nearing time where the game is just about to be wrapped up.

I'm putting in the final touches, and likely I'll get everything done before December. It's been a long journey to get here. Looking forward to being done, actually.

It's been quiet over the last month. I've been busy gearing up to getting a demo/beta together. Having released that into the (not so wide) wild, I took a much needed break. Now that break-time is over, I'm busy incorporating the feedback I've received thus far into the beta, and seeding new builds out to be tested. The tester pool is rather small, and kind of busy, so feedback has been slow. That's okay, though. This gives me ample time to put in fixes without having to feel rushed.

Overall, the feedback has been great. There are plenty of negatives, and of course some great positives. At this stage, getting more negative feedback is useful, since that means there are things I can fix to make the game even better. The only complaint that is going to be the most difficult to address is that the world feels empty in certain areas. This was partially remedied by introducing critters (which people like!) I don't want to be littering the entire world with useless critters, though. Need to find a better way to spice things up. I do want the world to feel big and explorable. Perhaps I need to incentivize exploration even more?

I have to say, it feels darn good to be this close after the amount of time I've spent on this project.

Made a handful of refinements to the inventory system. Most notably, there is now a visualization in the in-game menu that displays all the items you currently have in your inventory, up to some max. Maximizing the inventory display is unlikely to happen unless you plan out hoarding of as many of the "inventoriable" items as possible. In addition to the visualization, a custom animation now plays as you swap items in/out of your inventory, making it look a lot more natural.

With the inventory done, I have begun to shift my focus back onto populating the remaining areas of the game world -- including adding a new critter. The second half of populating the world seems to be going by a lot quicker than the first. It's surreal to think that I'm closer to the end of the game than the beginning. Exciting!

If you haven't noticed, I've taken a break from doing world populating to get some coding done recently. This is a nice way to prevent continuing on with development from getting too repetitive or boring. Before jumping back into populating, though, I realized it had been quite some time since I did a proper play through of the game in its current state.

I was amazed at how much time the first "chunk" of the game takes to get through. It took me roughly 40 minutes, and I know exactly where to go and what to do. When I play through, I don't spend much time exploring or wandering around. Considering how much of the world is left to play through after that first chunk, the game is going to be decently substantial time-wise. Even more-so for those players who want to find everything.

While playing, though, I did notice one thing that really needed to be addressed: there's a lot of backtracking. Now, don't get me wrong. A lot of this is intentional. There is, however, one type of backtracking that I can already see getting annoying. That type involves carrying objects. Certain types of NPCs will require you to have a specific object in your possession. Unfortunately, you can only carry one object at a time. This means you will most likely be carrying around some object most of the time, just in case you run into an NPC that needs it. If you run into an NPC that needs some other object than the one you are carrying, you have to drop that one (don't forget where you dropped it!), recall where the appropriate one is, backtrack to it, pick it up, and then finally backtrack to the NPC. One word sums it up: tedious.

I don't want the game to be tedious by any means, so the only real way to address this problem, save changing the entire puzzle design of most NPCs, was to add inventory capabilities for the player. For certain objects that can be picked up, the player can now throw them into their inventory. You can have an unlimited number of items there, and can simply swap them into your hands whenever necessary. This makes it easy to not be holding an item in your hands at most times. It also prevents the scenario where you have to run back and forth between different item types and manage the locations of each single item. Stuff it into your inventory and you are good to go!

This is a feature I had never planned for. During play testing, it was obvious that such a feature was necessary. Fortunately, it was simple to add in. The only downside is that I a good visualization for players to see what's currently in their inventory isn't as obvious. Thankfully, though, there should be just enough space in the game's menu to show something useful. I'm glad that up until now I hadn't crammed the interface to it's capacity.

While retooling all of the screens I was finally able to tackle a set of options that have been sorely missing for a while: gamepad customization. Long story short, you can now configure a plugged in gamepad to remap the controls to whatever keys you want. About time!

Currently, the game will pick the first gamepad it finds and use that as "the one". This should be relatively fine, considering that (at least in my opinion) most people won't have more than a single gamepad plugged into their system at a time. If they do, and let me know about it, then I suppose I can throw in a device chooser.

Playing with a gamepad gives the game an entirely new feeling. It's awesome to control most everything. The only functionality that's missing is backing out to the title screen. Usually, this action is reserved for the ESC key. I'm not quite sure how this translates to a game pad...

And in completely different news: I've also been busy throwing in a few secrets into the game. They don't necessarily alter gameplay all that much, but they'll be noticeable when you find them. For now, I want to keep a lid on them. I'd like at least some things to be a surprise for those players who keep tabs on my updates here.

I've been spending some time cleaning up and revamping the title, options, loading, saving, and new game screens. There isn't much to discuss other than they now have a unified look, including font. This font is used throughout the game now; instead of roughly 4 different fonts I was using previously.

In addition to fixing up the look and consistency of these screens, I also re-introduced screen scrolling when transitioning between them. This was a feature that I took out during the library transition from using Allegro to SDL, since at the time I didn't have any easy way to create buffers to store the screen's contents. These days I do, so it's back in! After playing around with it I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. I'm much too accustomed to all the screen transitions being instant that it bothers me. I need to continue playing with the transitions in so I can get a better feeling for them.

Here's a peek at how things look now...

I've been keeping things moving along. Added yet another critter object. That brings the total count to three types. To be honest, I'm really glad I started adding in critters into the game world. It really helps to bring it to life without overpopulating with NPCs.

Other than new critters, I finally got around to adding in an animation for when the player attempts to pick up something that is too heavy to carry without the appropriate powerup. What's interesting is that I've known this has been missing for the better part of... what? A year? Most likely. It took about 30 minutes to throw into the engine, including art. You can see that in the screenshot below:



Other than that, it's business as usual: populating the game world. I'm getting closer to the end every day. This is like map building all over again: the end is always just in sight, but or some reason it takes so long to get there.

Ah yes, one last thing: I've added in a new gameplay element that will remain a secret for now. I can say this though: it will be optional and won't be required in order to "beat" the game. I can also say that this secret will mostly be kept a secret in the game, as well. You'll have to search harder than normal in order to find it. That is all!

Short and sweet update today...

Progress on populating the world is going along quite smoothly. I'd say I've placed NPCs in about 10-15% of the maps. Not much more to report on that other than: it's going!

Other than "populating", there are two major points of interest in recent work I've been doing. 1: A new critter has joined the ranks with the birdies. 2: I revamped my sprite loading code to not hit the hard disk as much. I realized that even for sprites I've already loaded I was re-reading the metadata off disk every time I was re-using a sprite. Bad! Game launch time is increased by a drastic amount, now.

Spurred by a suggestion of a good friend while discussing some of the gameplay elements of the Oller, they are now capable of swimming in water. All other NPC types don't do anything special if they happen to dunk themselves in water. This might potentially change, but for now the Oller are definitely special in this regard and behave differently when they find themselves submerged.


Swim Oller, swim! They blow bubbles while in the water, like the player. Still to come is causing a splash and sound effect on enter/exit of a body of water.